It is no secret that with the traditional model of “vocational” education, the burden of the job/task-specific skill development falls on the employer. It is not economic feasible nor practical for educational institutions to focus content for every job area for every employer. So they, instead, focus rightly on core skills and competencies – relying on the employer to deliver the rest. This is where the best efforts of local educational institutions and training providers begin to break down even if highly relevant to the industry sector.

Employers rarely have an internal structure for task-based training of their workers, so even the most aggressive related technical instruction efforts erode against technological advances as every month passes. If core skills and competencies mastered prior to work are not transformed quickly into tasks the worker is expected to perform, the foundation for learning task performance may crumble through loss of memory, loss of relevance or loss of opportunity to apply them.

New workers routinely encounter a non-structured, rarely focused, on-the-job training experience. Typically, the employer’s subject-matter-expert (SME) is asked to “show the new employee around.” While highly regarded by management, the SME (not trained as a task trainer and having no prepared materials) has difficulty remembering the nuances of the tasks when explaining the process to the new employee, since that level of detail was buried in memory long ago. Each SME, on each shift, might have a different version of the “best practice” for processes, confusing the trainee even more – rendering the notion of “standardization” to “buzzword” status.

New employees have difficulty assembling, understanding and translating the disjointed bits of recollection into a coherent process to be replicated. Each comes with their own set and levels of core skills and competencies, and learning styles vary from the self-learner/starter to the slow-learner worker who, with structure to make sure they learn the right best practice, may become loyal workers.

The more time the SME spends with the new employee in this unstructured, uncontrolled and undocumented experience, which is the prevailing method of on-the-job training, the more the employer is paying two people to be non or minimally-productive. Adding employees can actually lower short-term productivity and add little to long-term productivity for an organization, but the costs will attract notice internally.

However, this only describes the costs of inadequate new-hire training. What about the incumbents who made it through the process and are part of the staff? Does anyone know which tasks have been mastered or not? No structured on-the-job training system in place implies no records of task mastery or metrics of worker capacity, therefore no methods for improving worker performance. Read More

Retiring Workers and the Tragic Loss of Intellectual Property and Value

by Stacey Lett, Regional Manager – Eastern U.S. –

Proactive Technologies, Inc.

The warnings went out over two decades ago. Baby Boomers were soon to retire, taking their accumulated expertise – locked in their brains – with them. But very little was done to address this problem. Call it complacency, lack of awareness of the emerging problem, disinterest or disbelief very few companies took action and the Crash of 2008 dispruted any meager efforts that were underway.

According to Steve Minter in an IndustryWeek Magazine article on April 10, 2012, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement.” Who is going to train their replacements once they are gone? Would the learning curve of replacement workers be as long and costly as the retiree’s learning curve? Would operations be disrupted and, if so, to what level?

“In our new “outsourcing nation,” a widely held belief is that employees are simply costs to be cut and not assets to be valued.” …. “Manufacturing faces a two-sided problem: it not only has thousands of people retiring, but it does not have the training programs to train skilled workers to replace them.”

Michael Collins

A Strategy to Capture Tribal Knowledge

IndustryWeek 5-23-16

In the last few years, it seems an alternative to the concentration of expertise in a few subject matter experts has become to use lower-wage temporary or contract workers who specialize in smaller quantities of processes, and who can be “traded-out” with a minimum amount of disruption. History will tell us just how costly that approach was and if anything was learned. h. Read More

Vocational Training in High Schools – A Model the United States Should Revisit: Part 2 of 2

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In Part 1 of “Vocational Training in High Schools – A Model the United States Should Revisit” in the June, 2016 issue of the Proactive Technologies Report, a personal experience of vocational and community college program completion was discussed. The point was made that the high school vocational training programs of the past, which was phased out in the 1980’s while schools faced budget cuts, seemed closer to a European educational system approach and offered a relevancy to local employers that nationally coordinated efforts of today do not.

The 1980’s saw the beginning of the proliferation of computers in personal lives and business. Machines were being retrofitted to be run, in part, by PLC (“programmable logic controller”) programs and new machines were being designed around it. Even the most mundane tasks, such as writing correspondence and processing a business transaction, was being automated. As the technology, with all of its promise, was understood and absorbed the rate of technological innovation accelerated – creating an increasing gap between 2 and 4-year educational curriculum and industry needs.

In order for a textbook to be integrated into a technical or career education program, someone from industry would have to write it. The textbook would have to be published, it would have to be marketed, vetted by the curriculum or book review committee and issued during an upcoming semester. Then someone would have to schedule the class and complete a 2 or 4 year program. That is 2 – 3 years for a book to be written plus 1 – 2 years to publish the book plus 1 year for the book to be marketed plus 1 year for the book to be accepted by the review committee plus 2 – 4 years for a student to complete the program. It is easy to see that the latest and best content might yield a graduate 7 – 11 years behind the current needs of employers. Read More

Differences in Job and Task Analysis Methodologies

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

There are many forms of job analysis today, each with its unique outcome, its own taxonomy and methodology. Depending on the needs of the job analysis data user, any type of output can be derived.

Job analysis can be defined as “the process of collecting and verifying information about the job.” Any job classification may have numerous components, such as duties, tasks and sub tasks. The best way to identify each is to break it down into its components. Approaching an analysis in any other way may prove frustrating and the output unreliable. In addition, when analyzing multiple jobs, tracking progress in any one of them may be difficult unless a defined, analytical method and taxonomy is established, and systematically applied.

The chart illustrates several popular types of analysis – from the position-specific to the standardized, general information; from those that provide data about the work and those about the worker. Most of the methods of job analysis today have limitations and tend to have “single-purpose” outcomes. Some that are survey oriented methods allow for more subjectivity and may diminish the usefulness of the data. The more technical the requirements of a job classification (e.g. classifications in manufacturing, chemical operations, healthcare) the less subjectivity may be tolerated. This type of analysis is easier to administer and seems to be a “quick and dirty” solution, but seldom gives the level of detail necessary to identify complex job qualifications or process-related training and testing criteria. Read More

Read the full July 2016 newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.